Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
Sir Neil Chalmers, Dr Jim Munford, Dr Mark Hill and
Dr Ian McLean
29 APRIL 2008
Q200 Chairman: Are you confident
that everyone can tell the difference between a chiffchaff and
a willow warbler?
Dr Munford: I think given appropriate support,
keys and so forth, that mistakes are few but mistakes will exist.
Lord Krebs: Particularly those from Selborne!
Q201 Lord Colwyn: Could I be reminded
how many professional taxonomists there are roughly and the decline,
what sort of percentage are leaving?
Sir Neil Chalmers: Across the whole country?
Q202 Lord Colwyn: Yes?
Sir Neil Chalmers: That is a very difficult
figure to quantify. If one looks at the major institutions then
one is talking in hundreds of professionals, I think we are talking
low thousands probably. I would not like to mislead the Committee
but I think it is that order of magnitude.
Q203 Lord Haskel: I think it was
Dr Munford who said that taxonomy is more to do with molecular
science. Are the volunteers acquiring these skills?
Dr Munford: No, I think that is really the dichotomy
that professional taxonomists are more attracted to the new sciences,
the molecular sciences, whereas the taxonomic skills required
for, as it were, naturalist recording are of a different nature,
and there is this dichotomy between what professional taxonomists
are interested in and those coming from the volunteer community.
Q204 Baroness Walmsley: That leads
us very nicely to the next question. The National Federation for
Biological Recording actually referred to this very thing in their
evidence and they called it the inevitable pitfall of sectoral
separation where the professionals are increasingly using the
molecular systems whereas the amateur in the field requires a
morphological definition, and perhaps a few other factors as well,
so as we have this split, is there any danger of the amateurs
being marginalised? After all, they do not have access to the
equipment to do the molecular tests and they do not have access
to the recording databases because that has got to be done finally
by professionals. If so, is there anything that can be done to
further integrate the two groups? Can I also add to that, is the
situation worse in the case of the less-studied groups, perhaps
the fungi, which rely quite strongly in the professional side
of things on molecular studies to differentiate them?
Sir Neil Chalmers: Perhaps if I could again
start, I think that it is true and welcome that there is a strong
growth of molecular systematics but my view is that morphological
systematics, that is systematics based upon the appearance, the
anatomy of organisms, remains and will remain very important indeed.
After all, what one sees walking around on this planet or growing
in it are plants and animals and they need to be recognised. Indeed,
if you are going to collect molecular data from organisms you
have to be sure that the organisms you are collecting them from
are of a particular sort and they are not a mix. I think some
of the most interesting questions that face systematics today
are to do with the relationship between morphological data on
the one hand and molecular on the other. I do not see a decline
in the importance of morphologically based traditional systematics.
I think, to answer your question, there is going to be a very
clear need to ensure there is a good interface between the enthusiasts
who will be almost always dealing with the morphological, the
traditional, and the molecular which is going to be done by the
professionals.
Dr Munford: We are in the process of giving
access to something like one million records from the British
Mycological Society so we are very aware of this debate, particularly
amongst mycologists, on the change in taxonomy. It is really not
for us in the NBN to resolve, it is for professional mycologists
to resolve in the fullness of time. The one assistance, as it
were, we give to this process is that there has always been a
problem with nomenclature from way, way back, so the Natural History
Museum run for us the NBN species dictionary which is our key
tool for dealing with these issues in relation to nomenclature,
and that contains within it a system for resolving synonymy between
species. In the worst case at the moment for plant names the synonymy
is something like nine to one of the well-formed name and the
number of synonymic names that you find, but that is pretty exceptional,
in most cases the problem is not as great as that, but we do have
a mechanism that deals with that issue.
Q205 Baroness Walmsley: Can I just
follow this up and take us back to what actually happens in the
field. If an amateur identifies or thinks they identify something
which may or may not be that something but perhaps something closely
related then it is important that that item, or part of it at
least, is collected to take back to the professional for confirmation
of the identification possibly through molecular means. That means
that the recording of where it came from and the condition of
the original organism is terribly important, and also the quality
of the sample and the fact that it has got to be fresh when it
has got to the professional, that is also very important. If you
are going to do that, you need really close co-operation between
the two groups, do you not, and perhaps we could hear what arrangements
are made to ensure that that can happen.
Dr Hill: Can I say something about the plant
world. There is quite a lot of collaboration in the matter of
the Spanish bluebell at the moment, an object of great interest,
and the thing is that this obviously is a very interesting question
because these things are invading the British populations but
the question is how much and where they have come from and so
on, and I think the molecular community and the volunteers can
work together very much to try and solve this problem and find
out whether it is actually a menace or not.
Q206 Baroness Walmsley: Could we
just pull them up from my garden!
Dr McLean: Perhaps I could just add from the
perspective of an entomologist, which I am, I have also seen good
examples of collaboration between professional researchers and
volunteers who go out and cover the ground. We tend to have a
situation where the professionals are in laboratories with very
expensive equipment but the volunteers are the people out in the
field who walk the ground, and I firmly believe that we need synergy
between those two communities, just as we have synergy in organisations
like the British Trust for Ornithology between professionals who
co-ordinate bird surveys and the volunteers who go out and gather
the data so I think the nature of the collaboration may change
but the synergy should be the same.
Q207 Lord Krebs: If I could just
come back to this question about the concern that there might
be separation between the professionals using molecular techniques
and the amateurs using morphological techniques for identification.
In a previous session we heard from Professor Bateman from the
Systematics Association a rather different view. He said about
the amateurs: "They are going to be out there in the field
with their hand-held sequencers linked to GenBank capturing images
of the plants that they are sequencing. What they actually represent
is a serious challenge to the relatively small number of remaining
professionals who are going to be asked by these amateurs to interpret
the results of their analyses." Do you see that, as the co-ordinators
of the vast army of amateurs in many areas, as a plausible vision
for the future?
Dr McLean: I would say that some volunteers
might well be interested in collecting those sorts of data and
collaborating with the professionals essentially. The issue though
is whether they are going to have the technical means to do so
at a cost that is reasonable for them. At the moment I think that
is rather unlikely. It might come in 10 or 20 years' time but
I think the immediate issues we are dealing with are rather more
pressing in that I think we need to get more collaboration now
based around the model of the volunteers collecting material and
transmitting it in suitable condition, as you have indicated,
to the professionals to work with. I think that is the immediate
challenge rather than the next generation which may well come
but I do not think we are there yet.
Sir Neil Chalmers: I think that it is a more
plausible scenario if one is looking at information technology
and the application of that rather than molecular technology.
One can certainly go around as an amateur with a hand-held palm-top
GPS facility and record very accurately where you have collected
something and when and what it is, if you have that knowledge,
which can then get fed into main databases very quickly and very
easily. Those are in operation now and developing very fast and
I think that is one real growth area.
Q208 Lord Methuen: In its written
evidence, the JNCC considers that "the fundamental problem
lies in the lack of overall direction and responsibility for UK
systematics", and "that a single government department
needs to be given responsibility for this". Where do you
think this responsibility should lie and why?
Dr McLean: We believe at the moment that, as
far as we can see, the responsibility at departmental level lies
firstly with Defra, who are the sponsoring department for Kew,
the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which sponsors the
Natural History Museum and other museums, and in fact has increased
their investment in those museums recently which is very welcome,
and then there is the Department for Innovation, Universities
and Skills which deals with research and training. None of those,
as far as we can see, has a lead role and there is no lead role
either from the research councils or from the Government Office
of Science. For a fundamental discipline, which systematics and
taxonomy is, we believe that lack of a lead department is a severe
handicap. After your last inquiry, it was our impression that
the Environment Department was going to take a lead role and really
try and develop a focal point for developing the discipline domestically,
linking internationally, but that has not happened for whatever
reasons. At this stage I think from the point of view of our agency
we find it difficult to judge between the departments, to be honest,
because we do not have the information that would help us to discriminate
between the departments that is going to have the greatest interest
and the greatest ability to solve the problem, so I am afraid
at the moment I do not think I can answer the second part of your
question in terms of who should it actually be because I do not
think we have the information to judge that. We still believe
that it would be a very big advantage to this discipline if such
a department were to be identified.
Q209 Chairman: Did you want to add
anything to that Sir Neil?
Sir Neil Chalmers: If I may, my Lord Chairman,
yes. I think there is something that has to be recognised about
systematics as an activity which is that it is a data-rich activity
in which you accumulate data over a long period of time to build
up big pictures about animal and plant life on this planet. That
form of activity is very important but it is ill-suited to our
current method in this country of funding science which, if you
look at the Research Assessment Exercise in universities and all
of the consequences of that, is focused upon relatively short
timescale projects, three to five years typically, to answer specific
hypotheses; problem-solving science is the major mode of operation.
Systematics is one of a group of sciences which is not like that
where it can take decades to build up a picture of the entire
plant and animal life of, let us say, central America, and I think
that it requires a lead from a government department, possibly
DIUS, to recognise this and set up a funding mechanism which is
appropriate for that kind of science.
Q210 Baroness Walmsley: I absolutely
agree with Sir Neil about the problem of short-term funding for
long-term projects but we might be excused for feeling a bit frustrated
on this Committee because this is the third report in which we
are being told, and we had all concluded ourselves, that we need
some leadership and we are simply not getting it over and over
again. Sometimes when you have three departments interested in
an issue you get a kind of useful creative tension where they
are all competing to do something. In the case of taxonomy, it
strikes me they are all competing not to do it. What can this
Committee recommend that might bring it to the attention of government
departments that this is something terribly important for the
future of the planet, that their department really needs to take
ownership of it and grab it from the other two departments and
run with it and really do something worthwhile? What can we do
to inspire them?
Sir Neil Chalmers: My personal view is that
you have to show that systematics underpins activities which are
vital to the economy of this country, to the education and well-being
of this country, and to government objectives relating to sustainability,
let us say, and there is work to be done there to get those messages
well defined so that they can have a powerful impact.
Q211 Lord Warner: Could I go back
to Dr McLean's point, that was an extremely elegant answer about
the kind of fog around the government departments which makes
it difficult for you to identify where leadership could come from,
but picking up Baroness Walmsley's point if the government departments
are not themselves fighting to have this leadership role, let
us turn it round the other way, what do people in the field think
about this, who would they like to see have the leadership role
despite the fog?
Dr McLean: Perhaps I could just start by saying
that part of the issue for us is because we are sponsored by Defra
we understand that department better than the others so we have
a closer view of that than we do of the University department
or Culture, Media and Sport. I would suspect from what I know
of taxonomists in my own discipline, invertebrates and entomology,
that it would be the university area and the research area that
they would probably feel greatest affinity for because that is,
if you like, a department which is responsible for developing
our knowledge whereas, in a sense, the Environment Department
and the Culture, Media and Sport Department are users of that
knowledge rather than actually responsible for generating it.
So, I think the view from the field, if you like, which I sense
is what you are asking, would be very much for the universities
and the knowledge base because I think people would feel a greater
affinity with that and I think they would trust it with their
interests to actually see them promoted and developed in the way
that we have been arguing.
Q212 Lord Krebs: That would certainly
fit very much with my own thinking but when we spoke to NERC and
BBSRC, they both describe themselves as users of taxonomic research
rather than generators of taxonomic knowledge. Does that seem
slightly odd as a position for you?
Dr McLean: No, I think it is understandable
in terms of their individual research council roles, but I think
we are coming back to the point again, the frustration of the
Committee that there is not something above that level that is
taking the lead role and unless we had a research council that
was primarily responsible for investigating the evolution and
identification of living organisms, it is quite unlikely that
any of the others would go for it. That sort of research council
is unlikely and so I think one has to look at the higher level
of the departments to see where it might be brigaded best.
Q213 Lord Warner: Can I move us on
into mechanisms. In the effective implementation of species recovery
programmes, the JNCC identifies lower plant and invertebrate groups
as those affected most by the lack of specialist taxonomic expertise
and elsewhere the JNCC has commented that an increased demand
for taxonomic expertise in marine organisms can be expected. One
of the things we have wrestled with is trying to understand what
mechanisms exist for communicating increased demand. Could you
give us your sense of what these mechanisms are and how effective
you think they are.
Dr McLean: I will certainly try and help you
with that. There is not, as far as I can see, any current mechanism
for directly joining up those areas where we recognise there is
an increased demand and need with the providers of taxonomy, but
I think there are two options: we could either use an existing
group which has a general overview which might be adapted to take
on that function or we could create a new group. The existing
group that we feel is closest to it would be the UK Biodiversity
Research Advisory Group, which I think some previous witnesses
have told you something about, which is designed to identify the
research needed to underpin biodiversity conservation, so that
is very much our sectoral interest and responsibility as an agency.
The UK BRAG could conduct a piece of work, as they have with other
areas, to draw together the requirements from biodiversity conservation
for taxonomic support and identification guides, so that would
be our first option. Our second option would be to establish a
separate programme in order to carry out the same function, but
this would need to be linked to a government department which
was taking a lead role for systematics and taxonomy in the future,
so if we did actually solve the problem of getting a lead department,
then having a programme board responsible to that department would
probably be a stronger solution rather than having the UK BRAG
(which is linked into ourselves and into Defra) responsible for
it. We would like to see the solution fit the bigger picture,
and I have tried to offer two options there.
Q214 Lord Warner: Can you give us
some sense of how much you think anyone is listening to the voices
of unease that are coming from the ground level and do you see
some sense of anyone acting on those voices?
Dr McLean: My personal experience with field
naturalists and taxonomists is that there is a considerable frustration
at the lack of progress. I think people feel that there are some
very good individual initiatives and a lot of good individual
things happening, new identification guides appearing and so on,
but there seems to be no game plan and no top-level agenda and
I think the people on the ground sense that and are frustrated
by it.
Q215 Lord Krebs: We talked a bit
earlier about the lack of taxonomic expertise in certain areas,
and again this links to the point about who is making a noise.
If you had to make a noise about the areas that are particularly
vulnerable, do either you or the NBN have a list of the top 10
taxonomic groups where expertise is threatened? We heard earlier
on from Sir Neil that birds, my area, is sadly not within the
threatened groups so I cannot bid for more money, but what are
the threatened groups?
Dr Munford: Following on from some of the comments
that have been made in previous questions, I think it is important
to recognise the difference between international taxonomy and
national taxonomy, and I think that professional taxonomists are
bound to be attracted towards international taxonomy, bigger science,
and I think that national taxonomy is reasonably well supported
by volunteer effort, although there are definite lacunae, for
example we have already talked about the mycological issues. The
groups that concern me as being where I do not see any activity
at the moment within the UK are some of the soil organisms, Collembola
for example, which seems an odd vacuum, and some of the smaller
organisms, like rotifers for example, and then it gets patchy
and it is very difficult to come up with a definitive list because
you could look at things like Coleoptera and you can see gaps
there and so on and so forth, but the two major ones where I see
a distinct lack of activity would be towards the Collembola and
small organisms such as rotifers.
Dr McLean: Could I add to that from a six-legged
perspective. I think there are about 24,000 or 25,000 species
of insect in Britain so in world terms that is not very big but
it is still quite a challenge. The major orders where there is
the greatest taxonomic impediment are the Hymenoptera, particularly
parasitic Hymenoptera, which are very significant ecologically
and fascinating in evolutionary and biological terms, which are
quite difficult to study because there are no accessible key works
to get you started. There are some very good key technical works
if you really understand them but it is getting people into them
at a reasonable level. Some of the other major orders like beetles,
the Coleoptera, which have already been mentioned, and the two-winged
fliers, the Diptera, there are over 6,000 species where there
is a substantial number of families where there is no recent taxonomic
revision or treatment. So just there I think that is illustrating
there are some quite significant problems. The Royal Entomological
Society started its "Handbooks for the Identification of
British Insects" back in the late 1940s/early 1950s with
a game plan to cover our fauna. Many of the volumes are old and
hard to use and the rate of production is one or two a year, which
is quite inadequate to ever cover the entire British insect fauna
within the foreseeable future, so that seems to me a very major
challenge from the insect point of view.
Q216 Lord Warner: May I move on to
a related point which is about the quality assurance, and you
did touch on that earlier on Sir Neil, in an earlier answer, but
I wonder if you could recap for us what the NBN has by way of
mechanism both to quality assure the recording but also what is
the mechanism for continuity of funding to underpin that quality
assurance?
Sir Neil Chalmers: I will ask the Programme
Director to speak to that.
Dr Munford: I have already mentioned some of
the key aspects. Firstly, the NBN is not selective in terms of
data quality but all data that can be accessed through the NBN
carries extensive metadata which describes its quality and we
have issued guidance on that. Most of the records that we receive
come from national recording schemes or local record centres and
they have in place procedures and protocols for assuring data
quality. We separate two aspects, data validation and data verification.
The validation is more to do with the correctly formed record
in terms of its geospatial references and so on and so forth.
The verification is whether the species reported is in fact the
species in hand, as it were. There is a whole variety of mechanisms
which are used by national recording schemes and local record
centres to assure the quality of the data. What we are doing in
the very near future is to publish two guidance manuals, one is
on the setting up of a recording scheme, which addresses some
of these issues, in particular the requirement for training and
mentoring of biological recorders, and another piece of guidance
is on verification and validation of data. It is best practice
guidance; it is not us laying down the rules; it is just us publicising
best practice. We have also got another initiative in its early
days which is trying to separate out those taxa which are inherently
easy to identify and those taxa which are inherently difficult
to identify, and there might be different procedures and protocols
associated with both, so you might be quite willing to accept
a record of a green woodpecker from a novice recorder but you
might expect for rare or threatened or just difficult taxa more
expert input into the founding of that record. That is how we
basically assure data quality.
Q217 Lord Warner: And the funding
point?
Sir Neil Chalmers: I think it is fair to say
that the funding is fragile. The NBN itself is an umbrella organisation
and you will have seen from our submission the organisations which
are members of that, and the NBN's budget is tiny and it is a
facilitatory body. Much depends, in my view, upon the willingness,
which I am glad to say is quite significant, of these member organisations
to put biological recording into their own programmes and to ensure
that this work is done well. The NBN's job is to try and bring
this together in a way which gives added value to the country.
It is fragile because each of these agencies has to decide where
that is going to fit in its own priorities. During the last 18
months I have gone around and talked to the chief executives or
chairman of virtually all these organisations, and I have noticed
a very big difference amongst the organisations in their willingness
to give a high priority to this work. For some it is very high,
and that is very welcome; in others it is distinctly low.
Dr Munford: If I might add something, Sir Neil
has referred to our funding base which is very fragile, but the
staff directly associated with the NBN Trust is a very small group
of staff. So we are always looking for multipliers; for example
we are engaging in dialogue with the Institute for Ecology and
Environmental Management who run training courses so that we might
piggyback on that and coupled, with the best practice guidance
that we are producing, organise training courses around these
aspects related to data quality.
Q218 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
Can we come to the NBN, in addition to morphological and biological
input that might be on that network with regard to species, what
else do you think would be useful to have on that network? Let
me explain what I think would be useful and then you can comment
on it. With global warming, and all the rest of it and exotic
diseases coming in from overseas, I am interested to know the
vector potential of various arthropods. Would that be a useful
thing to have on this network, the vector potential of the culicoides
tribe of blood-sucking insects for example, so that workers could
go to it and discover what the vector potential of a given species
or strain of culicoides might be?
Sir Neil Chalmers: If I may kick off and then
perhaps each of us can give a different answer. I think one of
the most useful things that you could have on this database is
a time series of records so that you can show changes over time.
You can for example plot invasions of invasive species very effectively
through this method, and I do think that that is one of the most
useful dimensions, if you like, of this sort of database.
Dr Munford: As I mentioned earlier on, we are
severely limited by funding and the staffing available to us,
however we have focused over the last few years on species distribution
data. We have now received a block of funding through the Big
Lottery Fund which will allow us to develop our ability to hold
attributed Polygon data, such as sort of habitat-style data, we
intend to move into the area of habitat data fairly rapidly. We
have also been working very closely with the recent invasion of
the harlequin ladybird and we have demonstrated, I think quite
adequately, that we can use the network of biological recorders
and the public in the UK to accurately monitor the spread of this
invasive species, and we would wish to do more of that. We have
had it inmind to visit for example the Royal Horticultural Society.
Gardeners are clearly very interested in invasive species, the
lily beetle and so on and so forth, and I am sure the NBN could
rise to the challenge of monitoring the spread of invasive species.
Another area I need to mention is that we provide data to a global
initiative, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, and
by using that facility one is able to plot, as it were, the ecological
envelope of potentially invasive species. So for example they
were able to plot the ecological envelope of the Asian tiger mosquito
before it arrived in the United States into Galveston and they
were able to accurately predict the area of the US that would
be covered by this invasive species. They now have the ground
truthing that shows that model worked well. Interestingly, when
they developed that model it showed that certainly Kent, Essex
and southern Suffolk would also be within the ecological envelope
for that mosquito and recent data confirms that it has in fact
arrived it is a vector for dengue fever.
Dr Hill: Just to add to the matter of what is
done by the NBN Gateway and how the NBN themselves distribute
data. We have been working with Defra on preparations for what
we hope will come off on a non-native species portal for Britain,
and the point about this is that it will use data through the
NBN but it will actually present the information through a separate
portal, and I suspect that might be the model that would be good
for having vector potential and that sort of thing, but there
would be a disease vectors special website which would use data
from the NBN but would be actually a separate entity with its
own individuality.
Chairman: We will move on, Lord Haskel?
Q219 Lord Haskel: I wonder if we
could move onto the care of long-term data sets. In oral evidence
the NERC identified the care of these data sets as part of the
national capability role of their research centres. Given the
transfer of the Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood to another
location, has there been adequate consideration of the impact
of these changes on major stakeholders such as the JNCC or the
NBN?
Sir Neil Chalmers: There have been extensive
discussions between NBN and the Biological Records Centre, and
indeed the Biological Records Centre is an important part of the
NBN because it is an umbrella organisation which involves the
Biological Records Centre, so I think there has been a good deal
of consideration of the impact of these changes. We expressed
our concern at the time the changes were first mooted and we were
assured that the Biological Records Centre was of high priority
in these changes, which is encouraging. We must be vigilant of
course in the months and years to come to ensure that the Biological
Records Centre continues to be able to give the very good service
that it has given in the past.
Dr Hill: May I add something, my Lord Chairman,
just to say the sort of effect this is having on us; it is making
us do one thing we had never even thought of before which is to
scan all our cards and get them digitally into a form where they
are available. Previously we had this vast supply of paper data
but it is now physically possible to scan it, so that will be
an improvement, I hope, to the availability of data at a national
level.
Dr McLean: Could I just comment briefly as a
previous nominated officer for the BRC contracting chain, which
is not currently my responsibility but previously I did work very
closely with Dr Hill on ensuring that we did get a good transition
to the new arrangements, so I think organisationally we put a
lot of management time into making sure that the process worked
well.
Dr Munford: I would like to point out that the
Director at the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology, Professor Mark
Bailey, is in fact one of the trustees of the NBN Trust. The Centre
for Ecology and Hydrology houses the servers which drive the NBN,
and I sit on the Biological Records Centre Management Advisory
Group, so there is a good deal of contact, and a good deal of
debate and discussion, about the issues that you have pointed
out. I am reasonably happy that all is being done to safeguard
the continuity of those long-term data sets.
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